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I think by writing about a place with great specificity, you manage to make it universal.

Bonnie Jo Campbell

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Bonnie Jo Campbell
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: September 14
Novelist
Writer
Kalamazoo
Michigan
Make
Think
Thinking
Specificity
Manage
Universal
Place
Great
Writing

More quotes by Bonnie Jo Campbell

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Nobody tells young writers it's okay if you're not very good, you'll get better. So I just thought I'm not very good, so I should try to do every other thing besides writing. That's how I ended up being a hitchhiker, a world traveler, and a mathematician.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
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We have a shotgun we inherited from my father-in-law, a paranoid Englishman living in Texas. I have a .22 Marlin rifle, similar to the one Annie Oakley had, and my husband has a .357 Magnum pistol. All those are locked up tight, of course. We have a couple of pellet guns that get more use than the real guns.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
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Donkeys are the most misunderstood and abused animals around the world.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
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I realized that I was writing about folks with lots of skills, especially fix-it skills and survival skills, who were nonetheless not doing well in the new-millennium America.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
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If you have someone falling out of the boat, you'd have to drag the boat up the river and film the same scene ten times, every time, dragging the boat exactly where it was up the river.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
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I'm of the people in the bar and the people in my stories. They are my tribe.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
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A Life in Men is a joyful, ambitious novel that is also an adventure traversing three continents, as well as a meditation on love, sex, and, most important, friendship, which can overcome time, distance, and even death.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
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Being five-foot-ten at fourteen years old was a little bit scary.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
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I like to go where the life is.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
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That's why I have to be a fiction writer, because I can't remember what just happened or where I went last week or what movie I just watched with my husband. I'm better off just making things up.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
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I thought that you had to learn to write by yourself and if you couldn't do it, then you were out of luck.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
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That's where I live, a junkyard in a neighborhood of junkyards. We have three tractors from the 1940s and '50s, several old pickup trucks, and a pile of scrap metal.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
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I'm pro-life, in the sense that chaos seems like life to me and order seems like death.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
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You can't beat a good sonnet, and you can write a sonnet without being married to the damned thing.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
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I read stories aloud at every stage. I listen to my writer friends when they kindly offer criticism. I listen to my husband when he tells me something doesn't seem right. I have my mother's boyfriend, Loring Janes, read to make sure I get everything right with the machines and guns.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
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Where I live you're not supposed to shoot a firearm within a quarter mile of a dwelling.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
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I'm not much interested in my own self when I write. I'm interested in what I observe out there, what's going on around me.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
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I mostly write about the working poor. Somehow, they're not being written about much anymore. I'm very interested in people who are in a situation that needs a little puzzling out. The thing that gets me started on a story is a person in a tough situation.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
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I grew up with donkeys, as well as horses, but I'm more interested in donkeys.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
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I have a second-degree black belt in Okinawan kobudo weapons training.
Bonnie Jo Campbell